21 December 2009

This page outlines the differences between good conferences, badconferences and academic scams.

The purpose of conferences

Why would anyone organise a conference?

To promote the exchange of ideas in a particular area

To promote networking by researchers

To generate funds for a non-profit organisation

To focus attention on a particular area

To promote the organisers' reputations

To make a profit for the organisers

Why attend a conference?

To learn about the area

To interact with other researchers

To add a publication to your CV

To have a holiday somewhere nice

Most of the motivations above are generally altruistic, but the last two ineach list are not. Promoting the organisers' reputations and adding to your CVare not necessarily bad; this is how academia works. However, these fourmotivations result in a lot of low-quality work being published.

Quality: If your motivation for attending a confernce is to have a holiday or to add (uncritically) to your CV the quality of the conference won't matter much. Incontrast, if you attend for the other reasons quality is a major concern.Imagine attending a conference and not making any useful contacts or comingacross any good ideas: you would not have not gained much!

You might still consider this conference worthwhile because you got apublication out of it. After all, having publications may help impress yoursupervisor or thesis examiners or potential employers. Publications will alsohelp your career as a scientist: you will be more likely to get funding, to bepromoted, to attract students, to be invited to give talks and so on. However,quality is vital and there is a huge range in the quality of conferences andjournals. These days it's possible to get anything published. In fact, in thefamous SCIgen affair acomputer-generated nonsense paper was accepted by a conference. As a result,publications in themselves mean little; what matters is their quality. In fact,if you publish in low-quality conferences, or, worse, junk conferences, you willfind this hurts your reputation more that it helps.

Spam and junk conferences

A spam conference (or spamference) is one which is advertised withjunk mail (spam). It is genuinely difficult to reach a large number ofresearchers in a particular area to advertise a conference, and some organisersof legitimate conferences are tempted into using junk mail. These conferencestend, however, to be lower quality ones, or new (or one-off) events which needto boost their attendence in this way. Well-established, high-qualityconferences are well-known in their area and don't need to resort to junk mail.These are the conferences which count most on your CV.

The conferences which send the most junk mail tend to be junk conferences,which have little or no academic value and are only run to make a profit for theoraganisers. Some researchers participate to get a free holiday and apublication but others participate in good faith, not realising the nature ofthe event. The point of this page is to ensure that you are not one of hem.

Where the money goes

Most conferences charge a fee for attendance which is put toward the cost ofrunning the event. Some events also raise money for a non-profit organisationwith which they are affiliated. The Association for the Advancement ofArtificial Intelligence is an example of such an organisation, and it is alegitimate one, although I don't know whether fees from their conferencescontribute to the association.

Some conferences, especially larger ones, subcontract some of thenon-academic organisational work. Many conferences, however, are organisedentirely by volunteers, although there may be concessions to the main organiserssuch as free registration. Invited speakers generally get free registration, acontribution toward travel costs, and possibly an honorarium (a small payment).The details of these arrangements are not usually publicised and there is thepotential for dubious use of funds, but as each incarnation of a particularconference series is generally organised by different people each year it isdifficult for misuse of funds to persist.

Although I see no reason why for-profit conferences cannot be of good qualitythere are a number of junk conferences which are run solely for profit, andwhere the quality of work is given little or no consideration.

Warning signs

Here are some warning signs but note that bona fide conferences may show some ofthese warning signs; in particular many reputable conferences are held in niceplaces.

The conference is advertised using spam

The conference has the same chair every year. (Bona fide conferences mayhave the same people on an executive committee for many years, but probablynot the same chair.)

The call for papers emphasises repeatedly that it is a "reputable"conference with many "famous experts"

The call for papers, and subject of the conference, is very general

The chair has chaired dozens of other conferences but probably has fewgood publications and does not work at a reputable institution

The conference is in a very nice place

You are invited by a stranger to organise a special session, or toundertake some other activity for the conference which would normallyrequire some stature in the area, when you in fact do not have this stature.For example if you are a PhD student it's unlikely you will be asked by astranger to take a high-profile role. Having said that, invitations to serveon a programme committee are not that uncommon or that high-profile, andadvertising for special session proposals is fine as long as they're notautomatically accepted.

Open access journal scams

Recently open-access journalshave begun to appear. These journals provide free access to readers on the weband charge authors to publish. This is a big improvement over the traditionalmodel of subscribing to journals since it makes results freely available to all.However, it allows for a new type of scam.

In August 2008 I was invited to join the editorial board of a journal, whichis normally quite an honour. I work in the area of the journal but didn'trecognise the editor and decided to check him out on the web before replying. Itsoon turned out this was an open access journal scam, which was new to me. The"publisher" was in fact a single individual at a private address who wasattempting to recruit academics to serve on his various editorial boards in anattempt to make them look legitimate and so attract others to the editorialboards and to submit papers. This is what a major publisher does when setting upa new journal, but a major publisher has the resources to do this properly(remember the section on quality!). This individual appeared to be working onhis own and apparently is not affiliated with any insitution and doesn't evenhave a degree. This is something like trying to pass yourself off as a doctorwithout having gone to medical school.

Announcement: KGCM 2010 will be held in two parts at two different times

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The 4th International Conference on Knowledge Generation, Communication and Management: KGCM 2010 will be held in two independent parts at two different times: SPRING: April 6-9, 2010 and SUMMER: June 29-July 2, 2010; in Orlando, Florida, USA

Please, consider contributing to any of these two events and distributing this Call for Papers among your colleagues.

Submissions for Face-to-Face or for Virtual Participation are both accepted. Both kinds of submissions will have the same reviewing process and the accepted papers will be included in the same proceedings.

Pre-Conference and Post-conference Virtual sessions (via electronic forums) will be held for each session included in the conference program, so that sessions papers can be read before the conference, and authors presenting at the same session can interact during one week before and after the conference. Authors can also participate in peer-to-peer reviewing in virtual sessions.

All Submitted papers/abstracts will go through three reviewing processes: (1) double-blind (at least three reviewers), (2) non-blind, and (3) participative peer reviews. These three kinds of review will support the selection process of those papers/abstracts that will be accepted for their presentation at the conference, as well as those to be selected for their publication in JSCI Journal.

Authors of accepted papers who registered in the conference can have access to the evaluations and possible feedback provided by the reviewers who recommended the acceptance of their papers/abstracts, so they can accordingly improve the final version of their papers. Non-registered authors will not have access to the reviews of their respective submissions.

Registration fees of an effective invited session organizer will be waived according to the policy described in the web page (click on 'Invited Session', then on 'Benefits for the Organizers of Invited Sessions'), where you can get information about the ten benefits for an invited session organizer. For Invited Sessions Proposals, please visit the conference web site, and go to the menu option and then to the menu sup-option

Authors of the best 10%-20% of the papers presented at the conference (included those virtually presented) will be invited to adapt their papers for their publication in the Journal of Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics.

03 December 2009

It's that time of year again. Suddenly, your inbox is filled with letters requesting that you submit a paper to the "The 14th World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics: WMSCI 2010" or "WESSEX INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY" or "The International Multi-Conference on Engineering and Technological Innovation: IMETI 2009", or the "IEEE Conference on Computational Complexity (that published many garbage papers last year)

Never heard of any of this because you are a philosopher getting the emails, too? Don't worry, serious computer scientists don't usually go to the conferences, although people do easily get impressed by all the names and submit a paper.

Strangely enough, all papers are accepted, as long as you have paid your registration fee. You don't actually have to come and give the paper, although the family will surely love following you to Orlando. The "Acceptance Policy" is spelled out in pseudo-scientific detail on the conference site. I paraphrase: We accept everything, because there might happen to be a good paper in there, and because a reviewer might plagiarize a paper they reject.

This conference accepted a paper back in 2005 that had been generated by a computer programmed by some MIT students, SCIgen. A nice blog discussion of that and the conference is found here. There was quite a row about this back in 2005, as one must question how scientific a conference is that accepts random (albeit well-worded) garbage and is willing to publish it. It is said that more than 1500 papers are accepted (at $ a pop that isn't chicken feed), and the "majority" are actually presented. That is not what a real conference is about, where you meet and discuss with peers working in similar areas.

How many of these thousands of papers ever get cited? That is perhaps an indication of how good the papers really are. I just searched the ACM Digital Library. There are 19 (nineteen) citations of the WMSCI conference. There have been 12 such conferences taken place.

That's not too many, so I went through the references for all 19 papers. Eleven of these papers were written by at least one of the authors of a WMSCI-published paper, so over half are self-citations. One paper is Peter G. Neumann's note of the acceptance of the fake paper in his "Risks to the Public" column in Software Engineering Notes.

As an aside, there's a fascinating paper on bibliometrics for discovering low-quality conferences published in 2007: Measuring conference quality by mining program committee characteristics.

Glancing down the lineup of invited speakers can cause quite some hilarity: Karl H. Müller, is given at CCCT2008 as being with the "University of Ljubljana (Austria)". I don't think that Austria has acutally annexed Slovenia, and a search of their web site turns up Mr. Müller as having given a talk therea few years back, but he is not listed as a teacher. He lists himself in his CV on the pages of his institute as teaching at any number of Austrian schools, but strangely, they don't list him.

Dr. Subhas C Misra is listed for this conference as being a visiting Scientist at Harvard, for another conference as being a visiting scientist at State University of New York. At another conference he is listed as the "NSERCPDF Scientist, Harvard University", but I find no mention of this program outside of his CV. Harvard includes CVs of its visiting scientists on its home page, there is no mention of Misra.

Who are these guys?

It seems that anyone can make up a fancy institute name and make themselves director, declare themselves teachers at University X (and may actually have taught there a semester or so before being put out on their ear), make up papers and fancy conferences and rush around finding themselves soooo important - but this has nothing to do with science! They can even pretend to be from some institution. Most are so large, no one can be sure that they are not actually from that place.

What can be done to stop this pseudo-science? Or do we just ignore them, but watch young people and unsuspecting colleagues pour departmental travel money into attending these conferences to present their papers? We do get a publication point out of it.....

In this blog, you will find many alerts for junk conferences i.e. conferences that you must not go. Conferences (like the IEEE Conference on Computational Complexity or the Conferences of Wessex Institute of Technology or the Nagib Callaos Conferences) that pollute our mailbox with much Spam every day.A very good effort http://iaria-highsci.blogspot.com gave us the idea to creat our own blog.Not to mention of course, the hundred fake conferences of IARIA, HIGHSCI, IASTED that pollute our academic world with junk or "almost" junk "conferences.But, we will have all the academic winter 2009-2010 with many posts informing you this unacceptable situation where the first teacher was the IEEE and the IEEE Sponsored Events of IARIA, IIISCI (Nagib Callaos), WESSEX Institute of Technology and the other fruits of the academic basket!